The 2009 Global Education Digest (GED) presents a wide range of education indicators to assess progress towards Education for All and Millennium Development Goals. These cross-nationally comparable indicators also provide benchmarks for the performance of national education systems.

The Digest provides data for the school year ending in 2007 or the latest year available, as well as data for 2008 for a small number of countries. It includes data tables from the World Education Indicators (WEI) programme, which are comparable across a group of 62 countries, including those that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In addition, time series data on tertiary education from 1970 onwards are presented.

The special focus of this edition is the analysis of emerging global trends in tertiary education, highlighting the rapid growth of tertiary education systems since 1970, changing patterns in tertiary education graduates by field of study, and in particular, the changing landscape of international student mobility.